This boxed set of Charlotte and Emily Bronte novels includes Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Villette. Jane Eyre and Villette are introduced by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, while Wuthering Heights is introduced by Katherine Franks, author of Emily Bronte: A Chainless Soul.

On the two hundredth anniversary of her birth, a landmark biography transforms Charlotte Brontë from a tragic figure into a modern heroine. Charlotte Brontë famously lived her entire life in an isolated parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and siblings whose astonishing childhood creativity was a closely held secret. The genius of Claire Harman’s biography is that it transcends these melancholy facts to reveal a woman for whom duty and piety gave way to quiet rebellion and fierce ambition. Drawing on letters unavailable to previous biographers, Harman depicts Charlotte’s inner life with absorbing, almost novelistic intensity. She seizes upon a moment in Charlotte’s adolescence that ignited her determination to reject poverty and obscurity: While working at a girls’ school in Brussels, Charlotte fell in love with her married professor, Constantin Heger, a man who treated her as “nothing special to him at all.” She channeled her torment into her first attempts at a novel and resolved to bring it to the world's attention. Charlotte helped power her sisters’ work to publication, too. But Emily’s Wuthering Heights was eclipsed by Jane Eyre, which set London abuzz with speculation: Who was this fiery author demanding love and justice for her plain and insignificant heroine? Charlotte Brontë’s blazingly intelligent women brimming with hidden passions would transform English literature. And she savored her literary success even as a heartrending series of personal losses followed. Charlotte Brontë is a groundbreaking view of the beloved writer as a young woman ahead of her time. Shaped by Charlotte’s lifelong struggle to claim love and art for herself, Harman’s richly insightful biography offers readers many of the pleasures of Brontë’s own work.

For everyone who loved Pride and Prejudice—and legions of historical fiction lovers—an inspired debut novel set in Austen’s world. Charlotte Collins, nee Lucas, is the respectable wife of Hunsford’s vicar, and sees to her duties by rote: keeping house, caring for their adorable daughter, visiting parishioners, and patiently tolerating the lectures of her awkward husband and his condescending patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Intelligent, pragmatic, and anxious to escape the shame of spinsterhood, Charlotte chose this life, an inevitable one so socially acceptable that its quietness threatens to overwhelm her. Then she makes the acquaintance of Mr. Travis, a local farmer and tenant of Lady Catherine.. In Mr. Travis’ company, Charlotte feels appreciated, heard, and seen. For the first time in her life, Charlotte begins to understand emotional intimacy and its effect on the heart—and how breakable that heart can be. With her sensible nature confronted, and her own future about to take a turn, Charlotte must now question the role of love and passion in a woman’s life, and whether they truly matter for a clergyman’s wife.

The biography ‘The Life of Charlotte Brontë’ by her friend and contemporary Elizabeth Gaskell was first published in 1857 to great acclaim and remains a fascinating insight into the life of the ‘Jane Eyre’ author. It contains Gaskell’s own personal recollections through her friendship with Charlotte, as well as excerpts from letters and beautiful descriptions of the Yorkshire landscape. It follows Charlotte’s life through from her lonely childhood and difficult schooldays, to her literary career, marriage and death barely a year later. Though a revealing account of Charlotte’s life and experiences, Gaskell held back on many of the more sensational details so as to avoid affronting a Victorian audience, such as Charlotte’s infatuation with a married man, and the shocking ill-treatment the Brontë sisters received at school. A must-read for fans of both Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) is an enduringly popular and highly regarded English novelist. Born in Chelsea, London, Elizabeth was sent to live with her aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire after her mother died, a place which would provide inspiration for some of her most popular works, including ‘Cranford’. A sociable and lively young woman, Elizabeth married Minister William Gaskell in 1832 and settled in Manchester. An industrial hub and the scene of much political and social change, her time in Manchester influenced much of her writing. Her first novel, ‘Mary Barton’ focussed on the appalling and impoverished living conditions of those living in Northern industrial cities and was a huge success, sparking the interest of notable figures such as Charles Dickens, who invited Elizabeth to contribute to the periodicals he edited. An active humanitarian, her works dealt sympathetically with the plight of the poorest in society, and she did not shy away from controversial topics such as prostitution and illegitimacy. A close friend of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth also wrote a highly acclaimed biography of the author in 1857. Some of her best known and most loved novels include ‘Cranford’, ‘North and South’ and the posthumously published ‘Wives and Daughters’, all of which have been adapted for TV by the BBC, most recently ‘Cranford’ starring Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, and Greg Wise. Elizabeth Gaskell is regarded as one of the most important novelists of the Victorian era.

On 16 November 1671, Liselotte von der Pfalz, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the Elector of Palatine, was married to Philippe d'Orleans, "Monsieur, " the only brother of Louis XIV. The marriage was not to be a happy one. Liselotte (known in France as Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans, or "Madame") was full of intellectual energy and moral rigor. Homesick for her native Germany, she felt temperamentally ill-suited to life at the French court. The homosexual Monsieur, deeply immersed in the pleasures and intrigues of the court, shared few of his wife's interests. Yet, for the next fifty years, Liselotte remained in France, never far from the center of one of the most glorious courts of Europe. And throughout this period, she wrote letters - sometimes as many as forty a week - to her friends and relatives in Germany. It is from this extraordinary body of correspondence that A Woman's Life in the Court of the Sun King has been fashioned. As introduced and translated by Elborg Forster, the letters have become the remarkable personal narrative of Liselotte's transformation from an innocent, yet outspoken, girl into a formidable observer of great events and human folly.

Charlotte Elizabeth Browne, daughter of Michael Browne, was born in 1790 in Norwich, Enlgand. She married George Phelan (d, 1837) in 1813 and spent two years with him while he served with his regiment in Nova Scotia (1817-1819).They then returned to Ireland. They separated in about 1824. She married Lewis Hippolytus Joseph Tonna in 1841. She died in Ramsgate, Kent, England in 1846.